Top 10: Terrible Celebrity Books

Celebrity forays into publishing are driven by vanity and are typically accompanied by raised eyebrows. Virtually all published celebrity writers employ either a cowriter or a ghostwriter, and the rare few that don't probably should. While critics tend to be ruthless, publishers and the public readily devour these terrible celebrity books.

Legitimate authors, meanwhile, resent them, and it’s hard to find fault when you hear comments such as those made by Madonna, who claimed that she decided to write a children’s book because the available books were, in her opinion, “vapid and vacant and empty.” For good measure, she also added, “There’s like, no books about anything.”

With that in mind, enter a top 10 of terrible celebrity books. For criteria, I eschewed autobiographies, memoirs and children’s books (only a top 100 could handle those). Instead, I sought out disasters across a diverse celebrity field.

Number 10

Swan - Naomi Campbell

Swan, the world’s top supermodel, has decided to abdicate her bitchy crown of thorns and go in search of her successor. But Swan’s sister mysteriously died many years ago (intriguing) and now she’s the postmortem subject of blackmail (thrilling) and the whole thing is set against the fast-paced, cutthroat, cosmopolitan world of haute couture models (dynamite).

Campbell’s openness about her use of a ghostwriter was probably a swan-dive taken to separate herself from the book’s terrible reviews. Among the kinder ones, Library Journal told its readership — mostly librarians seeking to fill their shelves — that Swan was “not an essential purchase.”

She has put out a couple of other books, but at least her publishing career has been less glitzy than her career as a restaurateur with fellow models Elle MacPherson and Claudia Schiffer was (you remember the Fashion Cafe — the worst restaurant you never dined in).

Number 9

Roman Triptych- Pope John Paul II

Shortly before he died, the beloved Pope issued a volume of mostly secular poetry. In it, he takes some time to muse on the standard poetic topics; namely nature, mortality and the meaning of life.

Was it a sin for Catholics not to buy his book? Not officially, but it wasn’t “official policy” for every Chinese citizen to buy a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book. That unofficial status didn’t stop the Chairman from selling an estimated 900 million copies, placing him second in all-time sales behind the Bible.

Dan Chiasson, writing for Slate, wasn’t terribly critical of the poetry, stating that it is “rather good,” but wrote that the poems come across like “secular-didactic… self-help literature” and that John Paul II seemed to have “a sense of himself as rather exquisitely set apart from the world” in a pontifical Morrissey kind of way.

Number 8

Angel - Katie Price (Jordan)

When dowdy, dumpy Angie turned 16, her parents dropped a bomb — they told her that she was adopted and her birth name was Angel. A year later, Angel’s best friend gives her a makeover, which reveals that she’s not so dowdy after all; in fact, she’s glamorous and beautiful. This realization grants her some much-needed, if vacant, self-worth: she follows it up with breast implants, drugs, and a love affair with a “dangerous” member of a boy band. Pretty soon, Angel sluts herself out to the world of the Page 3 glamour model.

Amazon.com’s reader reviews gushed with praise for Jordan’s first work of idiot lit, which apparently led her to task her ghostwriters to add a second novel and a children’s book to her collection. More than a few reviews, however, express disappointment that the supermodel-thin plot of Angel so closely follows the author’s real-life antics as described in her two prior autobiographies.